Procedure for denoising dual-axis swallowing accelerometry signals

Abstract

Dual-axis swallowing accelerometry is an emerging tool for the assessment of dysphagia (swallowing difficulties). These signals however can be very noisy as a result of physiological and motion artifacts. A novel scheme for denoising those signals is proposed, i.e., a computationally efficient search for the optimal denoising threshold within a reduced wavelet subspace. To determine a viable subspace, the algorithm relies on the minimum value of the estimated upper bound for the reconstruction error. A numerical analysis of the proposed scheme using synthetic test signals demonstrated that the proposed scheme is computationally more efficient than minimum noiseless description length (MNDL) based de-noising. It also yields smaller reconstruction errors (i.e., higher signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio) than MNDL, SURE and Donoho denoising methods. When applied to dual-axis swallowing accelerometry signals, the proposed scheme improves the SNR values for dry, wet and wet chin tuck swallows. These results are important to the further development of medical devices based on dual-axis swallowing accelerometry signals.

Description

CROSS REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS[0001]This application claims the benefit of U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 61 / 218,976 filed on Jun. 21, 2009FIELD OF INVENTION[0002]This invention relates in general to the field of dual-axis swallowing accelerometry signal analysis and more specifically to a method for denoising such signals.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0003]Swallowing accelerometry is a potentially informative adjunct to bedside screening for dysphagia. These measurements are minimally invasive, requiring only the superficial attachment of a sensor anterior to the thyroid notch. Even though single-axis accelerometers were traditionally used for swallowing accelerometry, recent studies have shown that dual-axis accelerometers can capture more of the clinically relevant information. Nevertheless, such measurements are inherently very noisy due to various physiological and motion artifacts. Denoising of dual-axis swallowing accelerometry signals is therefore essential f...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0007]This invention teaches a method for denoising of long duration dual-axis swallowing accelerometry signals using a computationally efficient algorithm. The algorithm achieves low computational complexity by performing a search for the optimal threshold in a reduced wavelet subspace. To find this reduced subspace, the proposed scheme uses the minimum value of the estimated reconstruction error. By finding this value, the proposed approach also achieves a smaller reconstruction error than previous approaches such as MNDL. SURE-based and Donoho's approaches. This finding has been confirmed for both, synthetic test signals and dual-axis swallowing accelerometry signals.

Problems solved by technology

Nevertheless, such measurements are inherently very noisy due to various physiological and motion artifacts.

However, wavelet denoising with the suggested optimal threshold does not necessarily produce the optimal results for signals that are not smooth. i.e., signals with noiseless coefficients being of very small amplitude for a large number of basis functions.

Recent attempts to overcome this shortcoming have yielded methods that can suffer from high computational complexities for very long signals, and do not necessarily reach the optimal results.

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